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Comment by ltbarcly3 | Hacker News Reader

"With Opus 4.5, Claude Code feels like having a god-level engineer beside you."

Well, not to me or the people I respect. It's getting very good, but it's like having a recent college grad who obsessively reads documentation. Someone with low skill but very high knowledge, often knowledge they are mixing up or not quite getting right.

I think if Claude is already 'better' at coding than you, maybe think about going back to college to be a lawyer or something. For the rest of us, lets just hope that Claude hits some natural limit before it gets better than us too. If it doesn't hit some limit I think we have a year or two.

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Yet when I try it, it feels like a developer fresh out of a coding bootcamp with no real experience. There’s no real reasoning, problem solving is still brute forced. It still rewrites rather than modifies. The context is way too limiting and it gets lost in its own “thinking”

The problem solving is very very not brute force. I have seen it make detailed analysis. Often if a problem stumps me it also stumps Claude, no surprise there. But if I give it a ticket I haven't looked at yet, it is often able to find the exact problem via careful 'reasoning' and fix it in 1/100th the time it would take me.

Except I’ve coached a lot of those people and there’s usually a method to their madness. You can sit down, help them back up to where they went off the rails, and it all makes sense.

Robot code is bonkers.

I had it One-shot the full architecture for a fairly advanced distributed system for a client. It then one shot the actual code design (following absolutely all our our internal requirements on auth, stack to use, security, code styling, documentation, etc). It then one shot (and we code reviewed everything thoroughly) each of the 5 micro services needed.

It one shot the infrastructure to use and created the terraform file to put it up anywhere. It deployed it.

It caught some of the errors it had made by itself after load-testing, and corrected them. It created the load test itself (following patterns from previews projects we had).

It did all of this in a week. With human supervision on each step, but in a fucking week. We gave it all the context it needed and one-shotted everything.

It is more than god-level. If you are not getting these increases in productivity, you are using it wrong.

Lol ok dude, good luck with your 'I just resell the output of Claude and I can't tell when it makes mistakes' business model. I'm sure it is a long term valid economic niche.

Before, I resold the output of engineers.

Now, I resell the output of AI supervised by engineers.

We can tell when it makes mistakes. It used to make a ton. Now, with the right context, it really makes very few mistakes (which it can find itself and fix itself)

Hey would you be willing to share your claude.md? I'm only starting out with AI coders, and while it often makes good choices for straightforward things, I find the token usage gets bigger and bigger as it proceeds down a list of requirements - my working hypothesis is that it's having to re-read everything as the project gets more complicated and doesn't have a concept of "this is where I go to kick it for this kind of thing".

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